US Government 'Took Control' of a Botnet Run by Chinese Government Hackers, Says FBI Director

An anonymous reader shares a report: Last week, the FBI took control of a botnet made up of hundreds of thousands of internet-connected devices, such as cameras, video recorders, storage devices, and routers, which was run by a Chinese government hacking group, FBI director Christopher Wray and U.S. government agencies revealed Wednesday. The hacking group, dubbed Flax Typhoon, was "targeting critical infrastructure across the U.S. and overseas, everyone from corporations and media organizations to universities and government agencies," Wray said at the Aspen Cyber Summit cybersecurity conference on Wednesday.

"But working in collaboration with our partners, we executed court-authorized operations to take control of the botnet's infrastructure," Wray said, explaining that once the authorities did that, the FBI also removed the malware from the compromised devices. "Now, when the bad guys realized what was happening, they tried to migrate their bots to new servers and even conducted a [Distributed Denial of Service] attack against us."

notificiations

[awwshit]

If the US knows some of the targets, and even perhaps accessed their devices, are they going to notify the victims?

Re:notificiations

[zlives]

all your botnets are belong to US?

Re:

[nightflameauto]

CyberWe CyberWill CyberSee CyberCyberWarfare CyberIn CyberOur CyberLifetimes.

You missed Cybertron.

Fix 'em or brink 'em

[Gravis Zero]

If the FBI is really going to be undoing botnets like this then they should either take authoritative control and keep these devices secure (firmware updates, change passwords, etc) or if that's impossible, too much effort, or too legality dubious then the devices should be bricked. I'm sure there is precedent for destroying devices that pose a threat to national security.

Re:

[RobinH]

You're gonna brick some lady's baby monitor in Pittsburg, who's working two jobs trying to raise a kid by herself? That's not the right thing to do. Contact the manufacturers and have them improve their product security.

Re:

[zlives]

Gold Apollo cable modems?

Re: Fix 'em or brink 'em

[data oyster]

ha! nice one. For sure, one symptom of malware in the old days was the disc drive endlessly in overdrive, getting noisy and hot. This would happen after I foolishly followed someone's advice to run bittorrent for free movie downloads. Sure you would get free movies for a while. Then the disc was irreversibly fragmented and now I am getting credit card charges from some country I never knew existed. No doubt this still happens in other ways. Best to avoid some major micro soft vendors! Speaking of wh

No comment

[Graham J - XVI]

"A representative for Integrity Technology Group did not respond to TechCrunch's request for comment on Wednesday."

Shocker

Just before the election

[Required Snark]

Not a coincidence. Besides stirring up trouble before the election, they want to be ready to cause chaos after the election. Taking down the botnet makes that more difficult. The same goes for Russia. Revealing that some right wing trolls were unknowingly(?) pushing Russian propaganda is also part of the attempt to keep the election process on track.

Now if someone could just do something about the out and out acknowledged lies (J.D Vance and his running mate) there might be a chance to have an election bas

Cia vault7

[dwater]

Because the cia don't make hacks look like they are from China. That makes it trivial to "take control" because it's really the cia doing it in the first place.
Collect their payout from the anti-China propaganda budget from the US government.